The ATO treats staking rewards (and similar passive crypto income — including most DeFi yield, validator rewards, and many airdrops where you didn't pay anything) as ordinary income at the Australian dollar market value when you gain control of the rewards. That income is added to your taxable income and taxed at your marginal rate — there's no special crypto rate, no halved tax, no concession.

Crucially, the value at receipt becomes the COST BASE for CGT purposes when you eventually dispose of those rewards. So you're taxed twice in two distinct events: once as income at receipt, once as a capital gain or loss at disposal. If the price has gone up between receipt and sale, the gain attracts CGT (with the 50% discount if held over 12 months from receipt). If the price has dropped, you have a capital loss available to offset against other capital gains.

The 12-month holding period for the CGT discount runs from the date each individual reward was received, not from the date you started staking. This makes record-keeping critical — most exchanges and protocols will give you a transaction history but the AUD value at each reward event is something you'll need to capture if not provided. Tax-tracking platforms (Koinly, CoinTracker, etc.) automate this for most people. For overall crypto disposals see our Crypto Tax Calculator.